| Summary: | Several of Jennifer Crusie’s novels include characters who are con artists. In an early novel (such as Trust Me on This) such characters are secondary, but in later novels (such as Welcome to Temptation and its sequel Faking It), the characters who are running the cons are increasingly central to the romance and the anticipated “Happily Ever After.” The presence of such characters raises questions about genre standards such as trust and trustworthiness, intention toward the other person, and ability to deliver on promises made. These elements dictate the outcomes in both con games and romantic relationships. Further, this paper argues that Crusie’s self-aware style and metanarrative tendencies extend the parallels between a con and a romance from the intimate relationships among characters to the reader-author-text relationinvolved in every literary transaction. Although Crusie’s conning characters may be read as particular anomalies in a generic pattern, they can be also seen to raise issues of reader response in their positing of a “Happily Ever After” that seems, like any good con, too good to be true. This paper concludes by wondering about the pleasures of reading a novel whose happy ending is simultaneously wholly unlikely and generically guaranteed.
|
|---|